Customer Experience Blog

Leveraging a Customer-Centric Culture

In today’s connected world, anything that happens in one place can quickly travel across the globe. This phenomenon is putting increased pressure on organizations to focus on their customers, ensuring that their whole business model is geared to be customer-centric.

Customer centricity is the driver of great results. But a customer-centric approach doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Culture has an important role in this equation. And it’s not just the company-wide culture that needs to be customer-focused. Organizations that want to be truly customer-focused need to go beyond investing in their internal strategy; they also have to make sure that the location where they’re setting up shop has a customer-centric culture since this will determine their employees’ propensity to put customers at the center of everything they do.

One country that has traditionally enjoyed a customer-centric and service-driven culture is the Philippines, and this nation-wide ethos has helped elevate the country into the number one voice BPO location in the world.

Over the past three years, TeleTech has invested heavily in the Philippines; tapping into the country’s ingrained customer-centric culture to turn our employees into superstars who are really focused on delivering the best customer experience. By leveraging the country’s customer-centric culture, we’ve helped our clients achieve tremendous Net Promoter ®Score, customer satisfaction, and voice-of-the-customer results. Our learning and development programs made the most of the service-oriented culture of our 20,000 employees, turning them into experts in the field for the benefit of our customers. A major telecommunications provider, for example, has really moved the needle when it comes to customer satisfaction and is now implementing a new NPS strategy.

We believe that to lead the way in voice BPO, it’s not enough to simply look at the fluency and tone of employees, skills that organizations have traditionally concentrated on. At TeleTech, we go a step further and focus on performance. In fact, our selection process looks at employees who have the ability to communicate interactively and our training is geared towards enhancing this skill. These agents are able to conduct conversations that really focus on their customers. Their motivation is not how quickly they can get the customer off the phone, but how happy the same client is with the outcome of that call when he hangs up. That’s the differentiator!

This change in focus was driven by a transformation in the way we, as a company, look at the Philippines’ business model. We shifted our focus from being country-centric to being program-centric which allows our business leaders to be granularly focused on the performance outcomes that really matter. Our business-driven service environment balances our traditional employee-centric philosophy with the business demands, thus driving great performance.

We are successful if our clients are, and the results we’ve helped them achieve show that we’re on the right track. We believe that a notable portion of this success was due to the recognition of this great ingredient—the nationwide service-oriented culture. This is why we’re committed to continue investing and growing our presence in the Philippines.